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Monday, October 31, 2011

Matured Professional….

I have seen one manager who was very political in the organization. He would create his opinions based on his perceptions. He also would make his opinions based on the feedback given by his cheerleaders. Facts were far away from the reality. Once one of my colleagues expressed her opinion contradictory to the feedback of this person; he changed his opinion about the girl. He told me, “My secretary is better than your subordinate.” The manager was even not ready to recognize the right of others.

I had always a question about the maturity of this manager. Being 20 years in the organization, he was loyal to his personal agenda of sticking to his position, but he was fully away from the maturity.People grow but not necessary they would exhibit the “professional maturity”.

I would like emphasis most of the important dimension of the personality, “Maturity- Professional maturity.”

We always used the term, “Maturity”. Based on our perceptions we labeled “maturity” to the people. We used statements like “Mr. X is much matured professional” or “Mr. Y is effective, but not so much matured, he needs to be developed.” But then how we measure the maturity.

What is the maturity? According to me the maturity can be defined as the acceptance of your role in life which gives you an inner sense of security. Executives need to be constantly aware of this purpose and their state of consciousness. They need to do work to become their mature self.

Mature executives are tolerant of others and respect people’s rights because they realize that one needs talents of a whole team to compete effectively in today’s marketplace.

In the same organization, one senior HR professional, alumni of top b-school was hired so that she would build the strong HR processes. However instead of focusing on the processes, she firstly used the tactic of being popular in the organization by working on increment and paying performance bonus. The rational of paying this was too mechanical and too old which most of the organizations use. When there is not legacy of such things, you are in a better condition to work on concrete processes. She did not. Somehow her tenure didn’t go well and poor HR Head had to resign. The above manager knew the facts but then he started putting the onus of everything to that lady. He was an advocate of formulating processes; he was senior management representative, but still he never supported any initiatives. He was the victim of his ego and his own personal agenda.

He blamed others for their mistakes. When everything was going good, he used to take credits. If somebody would do best, he was jealous and if somebody would argue with him he was revengeful. Immature executives do the same things.

Immature executives blame others for their mistakes. They have a need to take credit for new ideas, set up rivalry, are jealous, angry and revengeful. Immature executives have the desire to dominate simply to feed their ego. They don’t have the ability to handle negative feedback or criticism, and have the need to appear intelligent to others.

Beware of these dimensions of immature personality. It will never help you. Professionalism also counts your maturity.